Track: The Whole Engineer

Location: Ballroom BC

Day of week: Tuesday

Success as an engineer is more than writing code. Hear inward looking thoughts on inclusion, attitude, leadership, remote working, and not becoming the brilliant jerk.

Track Host:

Dave Copeland

Director of Engineering & Senior Most Developer @Stitchfix

David Copeland is a programmer and author. He's the author of “Rails, Angular, Postgres, and Bootstrap”, "The Senior Software Engineer" and "Build Awesome Command-Line Applications in Ruby". He has over 18 years of professional development experience from managing high-performance, high-traffic systems at LivingSocial or building the engineering team at Opower to working consulting gigs large and small. Currently, he's Director of Engineering at fashion start-up Stitch Fix.

Netflix’s culture memo famously says, “On a dream team, there are no brilliant jerks. The cost to teamwork is just too high.” Well, what is a brilliant jerk? If the cost to teamwork is high, what are some examples of the cost?

This presentation will focus on the jerk part of “brilliant jerk” and leave the brilliant calculation for another talk. We will spend a majority of the time on Emotional Intelligence and why it matters in...

Whether you’re a Tech Lead, Engineering Manager, or Project Manager for an engineering team, you probably weren’t handed a leadership instruction manual when you were given your first team to lead. Even experienced technical leaders usually operate from a set of instincts and the hard lessons learned from painful mistakes. However, leadership is a skill that you can learn and develop if you know where to look. You don't have to be a “born leader”, but you do need...

There has been much discussion about improving diversity in the tech industry. While admirable, focusing on diversity without accounting for inclusion can result in temporary gains. In this talk, we will examine the need for inclusive measures as part of building a strong engineering culture and its impact on the product development process. We will explore techniques for achieving balance in an industry that has historically skewed in a particular direction. Finally, we will look at these...

Being on a distributed team, working from your home or coffee shop isn't easy, but it can be incredibly rewarding. Making it work requires constant attention, as well as support from your team and organization. It's more than just setting up Slack and buying a webcam. We'll learn what you can do to be your best self as a remote team member, as well as what you need from your environment, team, and company. It's not about technical stuff—it's the human stuff. We'...

An engineer does more than write code. An engineer must work with a diverse array of people, and be a leader, a mentor, a presenter, a marketer, and a whole person. By building yourself beyond just writing code, you'll become an effective engineer. Come ask our speakers about how to make that happen. Let us hear your challenges and offer some tips, techniques, and new ways of thinking that have worked for us. Improving yourself beyond coding skills isn't as daunting as it sounds, and it's...

What makes a 10x engineer, or designer, or leader? It turns out that it is a surprisingly small part aptitude -- our skill at a particular task, and a surprisingly large part attitude -- how we go about it. It is far less the contributions of genetics, or education, or circumstance, than it is how we approach challenges, limitations, and opportunities in our work.

Weaving together diverse threads from Carol Dweck's growth mindset, to Daniel Pink's work on motivation, to modern DevOps...

Learn about machine learning in practice and on the horizon. Learn about ML at Quora, Uber's Michelangelo, ML workflow with Netflix Meson and topics on Bots, Conversational interfaces, automation, and deployment practices in the space.